Killing developersnepal.com - a Q/A site for Nepali Developers

It was Dec 2010. We had an idea of Q/A website for Nepali developers & programming professionals.
This is how we at Semicolon Developers initially talked about the presence of the site:

we thought an online community of developers from nepal is lacking. further, we developers and technology enthusiasts from around can dwell in discussion under a single website, the discussions there would be sure “worth” conveying.

this website idea is simple, you ask questions, you get answers. if you know answers to the questions in the site, answer them. that’s it.

More at : Semicolon d2d

Killing it was a tough decision. At the start, customizing Q/A engine was a tough work too, but we were in the idea phase and excitement was more. But now, its no more exciting. It is no more exciting that the idea which we thought would work, didn’t. Thanks all of you who tried developersnepal.com, your support has always motivated us and will.

Lessons:

SEO - for those from Nepal who Google. Content was original but far less to be tracked by Google bots.
Needs a lot of PR effort.
Be it an experimental idea, it still needs continued effort.
Stackoverflow - a Nepali developer would rather SO than search for a local community of website to contribute/get from. You can’t compete with big giants with just a domain name, sit and watch.
May be we were to early or too late on that idea here in Nepal.

Future:

We would work forever to communicate the fact Kathmandu Valley is one of the most favorable place in the world for IT professionals - daal bhat, gundruk, weather, friendly culture, IT exposure, hard working professionals, self learning computer science grads. That is why we called it Semicolon Valley back in 2008. We call our local community of IT professionals Hackers Chautari and we hosted it under the domain Semicolon Valley, we named it after Hackers News because that is what inspires us every morning, and finally presented the idea at BarCamp Kathmandu, 2011 as the most picked session of the event. We are more focused this time and will work on the idea of uniting truly Nepali IT professionals (those who work for / think about future of IT in Nepal) forever. Currently developersnepal.com redirects to Hackers Chautari discussion forum. If anyone in search of domain developersnepal.com lands at this post, just to let you know that developersnepal.com is on sell. Someone could well execute the idea, we are hopeful !

Got this far ? Please join Hackers Chautari or contribute to Semicolon Valley wiki. We are active there.

Website Re-design – How do we do it ?

Any website begins with our customers’ idea. The more specific they are about how the website should be designed, or how the website should function the more desired output we can provide. It is our job to take care of our customers’ website development requirements. We feel proud when we meet all the requirements in our final product.

Last year, we built a website for Shabda Samyojan Magazine. It is one of the most popular monthly literature magazine in Nepal. They are about to publish their 100th issue very soon. We felt happy to team up with such a enthusiastic team of well established authors. I met Bashudev Adhiari sir, Chief Editor of Shabda Samyojan Magazine. Talked with him for hours about what they are trying to include in their website. It turned, we have to build a online version of the monthly magazine.

Below are the requirements we were provided on our first meet:

Website should look like it’s hard copy version. Any reader who visits Shabdasamyojan.com should first see the cover page, Subharambha of the current issue. Magazine should be monthly updatable. Authors, Editors should be manageable via website administration. All the table of content of current issue should be automatically generated out of the existing articles published in website. Magazine issues should be archived and brows-able issue wise. Most popular articles should be shown in a block. Visitors should be able to contact us with their queries or articles from within the website.

There we go – with provided specifications we built the site which looked like the attached image below.
This was the story of how we did first live deployment of shabdasamyojan.com. We gathered content for the current issue at that time. Provided training to editor of shabda samyojan on how to use the website administration to manage website.

Time moves so fast. Shabda Samyojan website is now one year old. That’s not the news though. The good part is we at Semicolon Developers learned a lot about how the website is functioning. The Shabda Samyojan team managed to publish about 9 more issues to the website. In this one year – the lesson learned from managing the website was one of our achievement and theirs too. The web development trend in Nepal is highly inspired by popular websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. The number of internet users are also increasing. We have more internet service providers to count this year. This all changed the expectation of website visitors and also investors too. Accordingly, we developers have to take care of those expectations.

Websites these days are more alive. Be it in terms of user activities, content management, online sharing. We are requested more to send quotes for dynamic websites aka. Web 2.0 web sites/applications. To sync ourselves with these changing trends of website development we promised ourselves to set a minimum standard in website development. We promised within our team that we will never deploy any static website onwards from the beginning. Any website which is built by Semicolon Developers should be easy to manage with a intuitive website administration. And we are happy to provide such experience. We work hard to meet requirements, we work hard to create a value out of our customers’ online presence. We work hard to build a nice and long term relationship with our customers.

November 2011, Bashudev Sir and team called me again to discuss about the website redesign. They gave me few new requirements – I translated those website changes as “the lessons they learned from running a website for one complete year.”  I’ve already said that was the most motivating factor to us too. It is obvious, any web 2.0 website or monthly content updating website like shabda samyojan sure would have more content as time goes by. The more content we store in the database the desire to find the content more easily becomes priority. This is the exact case here. Since, shabda samyojan already have 9 issues published online – it is obvious we needed a more trendy and generic website layout where all the existing content should be visible to its reader at one shot.

There we go :

This is how the website looks in paper. The changes were about Shabda Samyojan needed a new and refreshing layout. The magazine cover page in old design covered most of the website space – reduce the cover size. The content of current issues were less visible – make it more visible. Visitors should be able to leave feedback/comments on published articles. Their visitors were most active in Facebook so why not provide visitors a way to connect via Facebook Fan Page where Shabda Samyojan team can interact with their readers ? With increase in number of website visitors – now yes searching for some advertisement partners was obvious. Hence, build an easy to use advertisement section.

We promised to provide these changes by end of November 2011. One of our, say it expertise or say a professional practice at Semicolon Developers is we build easy to use websites for our non tech customers and also our underlying website development architecture is extensible. We are proud on this. You need changes – that’s fine. You take care of some budget for the extended feature  and give us a week to work on it. Boom ! Since, website development is our field, we want to improve ourselves each day and each year at this fields – we know what changes to expect during and after development of a website or a web application. With such experience in our team – starting with the old codebase of one year old Shabda samyojan website was less distracting and more of motivation for us to take care of our customers’ changing requirements.

Yes, it took few days to our new developers at Semicolon to catch up with the old code. After that adding features was just plug in a new module for “this feature” and extend that “articles module” to support comments. We did it on time. The final website redesign looked like this:

We are very happy with this work since Shabda Samyojan team praised our effort. They liked the way we addressed their requirements.

We are always eager to work as technical partner of our customers. We always ask our customer that web development is our profession let us take care of it. You provide us clear requirements to work on. You focus more on your ideas, focus more on generating revenues from your investment, focus more on serving community with your work – let us take care of your online presence. If you too are searching for a experienced team to assist you in web development, web site redesign or android application development – send us a message from our contact page we will follow up within a day or two.

Post written by @bhu1st